‘Islamic’ Kindergartens Cause a Stir in Austria
At least a quarter are backed by groups propagating extremist ideologies like Salafism, Aslan believes.
"Parents are sending their kids to establishments that ensure they are in a Muslim setting and learn a few suras (chapters from the Quran),” Aslan told AFP.
"But they are unaware that they are shutting them off from a multicultural society,” he said.
The study, published last year, has been jumped on by critics of immigration — not least the far-right Freedom Party — in the wake of attacks such as Paris and Brussels perpetrated by extremists who grew up in Europe.
Undercover
But many reject Aslan’s findings, questioning its methodology.
The magazine Biber, which writes for and about minorities, sent a veiled Muslim reporter undercover posing as a mother looking for a place for her son at 14 Muslim kindergartens.
She found no evidence to back up Aslan’s suggestions that they were churning out "little Salafists” or that things like the children singing were banned.
But around a third were according to the magazine "problematic”, "cutting off or isolating children” from mainstream society. It also voiced concerns about the "openness” of some staff and the level of German spoken.
Vienna City Hall has since sought to calm the situation by commissioning an in-depth study involving a six-strong research team which will be published later this year.
But the first problem is establishing how many Islamic kindergartens there are. Vienna has 842 registered kindergartens, 100 of them Catholic-run and 13 Protestant, but the number of Muslim ones is not known.
City of immigrants
Vienna is home to 1.8 million people, half of whom have a parent born abroad or who were born abroad themselves. Ever since it was the capital of a vast empire, it has been a magnet for outsiders, not all of them always welcome.
"But what is new in recent years has been the religious aspect of the debate about integration,” said Thomas Schmidinger, political scientist and Islam specialist at Vienna University.
Austria, a nation of 8.7 million people, has received more than 130,000 asylum applications since 2015 following the onset of the European Union’s biggest migration crisis since World War II.
The Freedom Party is riding high in the polls. Surveys suggest that public attitudes to Muslims have hardened. Attacks on migrant shelters soared last year.
Organisations representing Austria’s 700,000-strong Muslim population say that in this context, Aslan’s flawed report has only fanned the flames.
"This study feeds populism and forces Muslims to justify themselves constantly,” said Murat Gurol from newly created pressure group the Muslim Civil Society Network.
The 45-year-old IT worker said he sent his own son to a Muslim kindergarten in order to learn "the values of solidarity, humanity and responsibility”.
As a child he went to a Christian preschool, and "I don’t see why that should be allowed for one religion and not for another”, he told AFP.
